Governing By Wrecking Ball

Many of the more conservative members of Congress are riding along with the (newly empowered) wave of Tea Partiers and intensifying their howls against supposed overblown spending in the Federal Government. Granted, there is a problem, and it is not confined to this country. Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland are facing huge budgetary difficulties, and Argentina is recovering from having basically gone under a while back.

One of the big problems in the United States, though, is that many of the long-term and medium-term structural deficit problems were intentionally created by conservatives, who dropped revenue to accommodate their philosophical proclivities, but failed to accordingly cut programs and spending to accommodate the shortage of funds. The fact that the economy was tanking and tax revenues dropped even further for the Feds and for most states didn't help at all.

Of course, the conservatives in power during the Bush era couldn't make cuts in government programs concurrent with the tax cuts, because then they would be hounded out of office by the voters (as they pretty much were in 2008 because of the economic collapse mostly caused by their policies). So they have preferred to let society and infrastructure crumble, which, coincidentally, goes along conveniently and elegantly with a psychotically apocalyptic vision of the world colored by masturbatory religious fervor. This plan also fits in well with a sudden, feverish insistence that everything has to be chopped to the bone (after the fecal matter is already flying through the fan blades) to save the republic. All they had to do was block everything they could for two years after going into the governing minority, and do everything in their power to obfuscate what is really going on and shift the blame for much of the resulting carnage to the Democrats.

It never hurts to have an electorate comprised of a huge bloc whose attention span is dictated by texting and video games, and others who are just desperate to find someone to blame. Toss in a creeping imbalance of wealth and the resultant destruction of the middle class, and you have the cherry on the whipped cream topping the perfect storm.

It is doubtful that any of this is included in the definition of the verb "to govern" in the dictionary...